Overturned shapes font

andrej dienes

I would like to know your opinion on this psychedelic creation because I've been looking at it for too long. It was created as an experiment, but I'm trying to find a balance between op-art effect and usability, although for body copy it certainly won't work. The basis of typeface is humanistic, the open apertures and the oblique axis can be felt everywhere. Interesting is the "weightlessness" of the font – the characters do not resemble the essence of the press. Twisted shapes complement well with today's popular "deep joining". Really deep this time. The specialty is the ability to move smoothly from sans to serif. Variable axes are called by synesthetic terms – instead of the traditional Weight is "Color" (a typographic term indicating the degree of page coverage) and instead, Sans/Serif is "Taste" (a selection of flavor text). All this supports the overturning of the senses.

Sander Pedersen

One issue in the sans-serif is that a few monolinear capitals (E F H L T) look less related to the rest because they don't have this treatment of contrast. Depending on which letters appear in a word, it can have a disturbing effect – as if another sans-serif font has substituted these characters.

andrej dienes

Sure, I've thought about it a lot. Well, if I apply this treatment to the "H" crossbar for example, then I would have to change "A", "E", "L", "Eth" or "Tbar" etc., as well. I think it would end up too exaggerated. I've also tried these guillotines, but that's a foreign element in this design:

Sander Pedersen

The twisting is more convincing in the lowercase sets, because it looks like an exaggeration of calligraphic contrast – with or without serifs. But there is a kind of struggle between letters that are more calligraphic and those that are more constructed. In both sans-serif and serif styles, letters like N M Z v w z don't have the same easiness, and appear more artifical because it looks like the strokes are shifted apart, rather than having an overturning movement resulting in the tapering contrast. That's why those cuts in LEFT look foreign compared to the rest, because the strokes still remain monolinear.

Sometimes it works better to leave a difficult letter as the exception to the rule, but with several exceptions it gives an overall impression of one idea being inconsistent, or too many ideas in one typeface. But I think with more sketching and experimenting there can be found a convincing solution that carries throughout the alphabet.

Andreas Stötzner

for the minuscules it works quite well. For the capitals: have you tested to implement a line-crossing at angled parts?

andrej dienes

I have an alternative "Z" with twisted diagonals. It could be applied to other capitals as well, but the transition to the serif version would be terrible.